Shammy Man Can

The shammy man can wipe away the country without leaving a trace of the way we have known her/ The shammy man can/ The shammy man can legalize pot to win the vote of every stoner/ The shammy man can/ The shammy man can spend our future away, squandering trillions/ The shammy man can/ The shammy man plans to legalize foreign aliens in the millions/ The shammy man can/ The shammy man can pull a flimflam on all of us without transcripts or even birth certificate ever revealing/ The shammy man can/ The shammy man can because idiots find him so appealing

Pray for Rush

Rush Limbaugh is like a trusted friend many have shared lunch with for twenty years; to some who share three hours most weekdays with him, Rush is more like a member of the family. Preliminary reports (on Drudge- linking to Breitbart)indicate that a serious health issue has befallen this man who is the embodiment of American optimism. I will be saying prayers for him. Perhaps you will join me.

The Hype Presidency

Having underlings try to assuage the public that the Obama administration, that does not battle radical expansionist Islam and the terror that it inspires seriously, come out to show just how serious our efforts are, just after the woeful Janet Napolitano betrayed the true lack of resolve on the Sunday shows, rang hollow, so the President himself had to come out to try and make the message stick. In this administration of style over substance, Obama had to appear sufficiently dour in the midst of his Hawaii celebrations to pretend determination. If team Obama was serious, the communication would be directed at Yemen and would go something like this: "We want you to produce the bodies of those plotting mass murder against the USA which we can verify through DNA, or we will have to assume that like the Taliban in Afghanistan, you are becoming actively complicit by harboring them, and we will direct our full might against not merely them but you who are their accomplices." Yemen could not help but understand and comply or a serious leader like the last President Bush would simply crush them. But Obama will never do this.

A Political Corpse

Nebraska's Democrat Senator, Ben Nelson, formerly portrayed himself as a pro-life, fiscal conservative, who was purported to be to the right of so-called moderate and now evidently non-existent middle of the road Democrats in the US Senate who have now all rubber stamped Obama's leftward path and Nelson has veered along with them. Nelson is crashing in his home state polls and flailing like the drowning man he is trying to save himself before he goes under for the third time. The people of Nebraska are the essence of Middle America, the embodiment of patriotism, hard work, and thrift. Nebraskans do not want even the inkling of socialism tainting our Republic. Nebraska despises heavy-handed tactics of big government. Nebraska abhors the enormous spending of Federal dollars by Obama, and the huge amount of taxes being taken from industrious Nebraskans to pay for it. Ben Nelson could not after his political suicide of voting in "hell care" win a race for dog catcher anywhere in the Cornhusker state.

More Good News

After describing the spin over the attempted terrorist bombing yesterday, today's commentary undertakes to reveal manipulation of the public in puffing an at best barely noticeable to non-existent recovery that Obama is being feted with credit for when TARP was passed and "Helicopter Ben Bernanke" began throwing money at Wall Street when the last George Bush was still President. My contention is that any recovery is incidental to all the grotesque government intrusion into the markets and the breathtaking squandering of our tax dollars by Washington. We should never forget that after the billions in bailouts at our expense, some of the Wall Street firms that benefited from taxpayer largess are handing out huge year end bonuses. So traders, bankers, and brokers who forgot basic fiduciary responsibility and helped put us in a sinking boat with their insanely risky investments will celebrate a glorious New Year greatly enriched at our expense while over ten percent of our workforce remains jobless. And more spin is in play here with glowing reports about the purported recovery. The media hypes a 3.6% increase at retail sales over the holidays but fails to put it in proper context that the baseline of sales in the prior year reflected catastrophe with the previous year's sales as bleak as in the Great Depression. So there may have been a slight increase in sales and profits but even this better number looks anemic when you study sales just two years back (2007). The media will crow about the great job their boy Obama is doing, but the widely despised last President Bush only presided over one worse Christmas sales season. I will admit the numbers may have improved marginally- from depression to mere prolonged (hopefully not endless recession), but this occurred in spite of government interference, not because of any brilliant recovery plan by Obama, Geithner, and Bernanke.

So Many Superlatives

The initial public pronouncements by officials following the attempt to bring down an international flight deliberately minimized the event. The public was initially only told that a passenger had set off a firecracker on board a plane bound to Detroit from Amsterdam. So what vigilant travelers were informed of seemed to be relatively trivial, only a (somewhat malicious) prank. After all, those in authority would not want to panic, scare into staying home, or increase awareness of possible attacks so much that air travelers might actually avert the next "man-caused disaster" by acting to protect themselves- a Muslim or two might be singled out, profiled, or heaven forfend, even offended. After downplaying the incident originally, then the spin takes place with the active assistance of the complicit media, and vested interest airlines who do not want customers further spooked. So on the Sunday shows, the Obama administration sent Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who sees potential right-wing terrorists in every Obama political opponent, out to calm the public with statements about how flawlessly security worked with "the system has worked very, very smoothly over the past several days" when there was a lapse of unbelievable magnitude with utter chaos as the purported protectors tried to catch up to the threat. This puffing by Napolitano was so obviously not merited that she had to essentially reverse her statement from Sunday, on Monday, not with a mere retraction, but with the admission that the system had failed miserably as a man whose own family had warned US authorities in Nigeria about his Jihadist inclinations, who paid for the ticket with three thousand dollars cash, and who had no baggage to check for what was supposed to be a trip from one continent to another, raised no flags amongst examiners to prompt additional scrutiny. The painfully glaring security failure brought a slow grudging concession that matters should have been handled differently by Secretary Napolitano. The acknowledgement is accompanied by more spin, spin, spin as the dinosaur media continues to portray the Obama administration in the best light possible. Nothing in the screening worked as it should have, but fortunately, the terrorist was just as incompetent as the security personnel. Whether you believe it was dumb luck or the intervention of God who is on our side (as I do), tragedy was only averted as the bomb did not detonate as designed- only partially igniting and setting the bomber himself alight. Had the weapon functioned properly, we would be mourning hundreds of lives lost with no way to spin the blatant negligence that would have allowed it. An act of willful mass murder was averted, but it was in spite of Janet Napolitano and team Obama, not because of them.

A Shabby Presidency

Barack Hussein Obama always seems impeccably turned out. Regardless of what tragedy afflicts the nation (Fort Hood shootings, swine flu crisis), the President looks like he stepped right out of the pages of GQ. We have never had a leader who dressed so well while accomplishing so little. Obama is conducting our first fashion plate Presidency. It is no coincidence that a Paris Hilton-type President who is celebrated for being a celebrity receives so much glowing attention from the vacuous entertainment press.  In a time that cries out for intellectual rigor, the US is suffering under a President who emphasizes style over substance. 

Three Christmas Gifts

In addition to the Christmas "blessing" (said to honor the memory of the Chappaquiddick drowner) the Democrats are choking us with of health care, Americans were given three gifts from abroad, and no, they certainly are not the gifts of the magi. Brought to us from the dar al-salam to reward we infidels in the dar al-harb, the first present was from the Taliban in Afghanistan- a video of captured US soldier Bowe Bergdahl callously released at this time to taint Christmas for our nation and further torture the hostage's family. The second surprise for us was on an international flight where a Nigerian national ignited himself presumably in an attempt to bring down the packed passenger jet, the terrorist said at the behest of al Qaeda who he said had trained him for the suicide mission in Yemen. The last present is a Dusey- a gift that promises to keep on giving- a nuclear armed Iranian terror state led by end time madmen. If these presents do not warm your heart, just think of how much worse the new year may hold.

Time for Reflection

As the year's end draws near, many of us take personal inventory, engage in thoughtful self-assessment, and heartfelt analysis of our actions (taking into account shortcoming and failures) during the year- unless you are Barack Hussein Obama. If you our the current mal-President, then you blithely judge your performance to be worthy of "B+" stature that you will soon raise to an "A" with the passage of "hell care". "BO" is utterly unconcerned about the growing number of homeless, he is nonchalant about rising poverty, and he is cavalier at joblessness hovering at or over ten percent. But what else would you expect of a millionaire attorney who allowed his own half-brother to languish in a twelve foot hut in Kenya and never bothered to help his Aunt Zeituni rise out of the Boston projects or clarify her immigration status to allow her to legally remain in the country? The President is cold and heartless with his own flesh and blood, so what care could he ever be expected to show strangers (like the newly unemployed or recently evicted). No the dinosaur media will not remind you of Barry's many failings, with a whitewash of the nation's many struggles. So, beware cap and trade and illegal alien amnesty will be along in the coming year with ACORN de-funded at first, but recently "re-funded" easing the way for many A-plus Democrats to cheat their way back into office. Merry Christmas.

Very Dreary Christmas

When times look bleak/ With employment so weak/ Computer crashes, malicious hackers, national security leak/ I bite my tongue and dare not speak/ Instead, I reminisce with dear old Dad/ About the eighty-eight blessed years he has had/ But even the old eternal optimist is sad/ We find this a not so festive season/ And Obama is the reason/ Our brash unqualified boy/ Has robbed the season of mirth and joy/ He treats the nation as a toy/ Robs our liberty with every ploy/ We will not bow down to this freedom thief/ Nor ever salute usurper-in-chief.

Lumps of Coal

Certain politicians, particularly Democrats in this current health care debate, merit nothing but coals but have instead received lavish legal bribery as a payoff to support the legislation. Ben Nelson has been a very bad Senator with his egregious behaviour, but he was not punished but rewarded with the other forty-nine states being forced to pick up the tab for Nebraska. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner praised himself and venerated his master Obama in an interview on ABC news this morning for saving the nation from recession, but bad little tax cheat economists who puff success and glom onto credit for a natural economic cycle that would have brought recovery possibly even faster without so much intervention do not deserve a full stocking. And when Geither insists in the same interview that banks loosen credit and provide loans to members of communities that have no interest in ever paying them back, the door is once again open to a new crash with government insisting that those who are not credit-worthy receive loans anyway- just the type of circumstance brought on by allegations of redlining that caused the sure to default loans that started the recession in the first place. Geithner should not have even a coal- a cinder is plenty for him. And what of the responsible citizen who has payed his taxes all along and who has often borne the burden of medical insurance himself, sometimes paying outrageous premiums to insurers of last resort because of pre-existing conditions. We will have nothing left but coals while Obama's core supporters, shiftless dole-dwellers will enjoy a glorious Christmas at our expense- paid for by our hard-earned but all too easily confiscated tax dollars.

Screw Your Health

A toast heard in several languages since ancient times is "to your health". The Obama "hell care" debacle inverts this old phrase slightly, giving it a brand new meaning. What may be coming out of the mouths of politicians supporting the initiative sounds oh so similar, but if you listen carefully, you hear the distinction. "Screw you- responsible taxpayer." "Screw you senior citizen" who saved the country from Great Depression and the scourge of the Axis but who will now face care rationing and pressure to accept euthanasia, stripping dignity and prematurely ending lives. "Screw you unborn child" and incidentally, make those who revile the idea of abortion subsidize them anyway. All these are your Christmas gifts from your Democratic politicians. Enjoy them now and remember them next November.

Speed the Plow

The rise of Obama meant freedom was imperiled. I started this blog in October of 2008 because to me this was obvious. Obama admitted in his off the cuff Joe the Plumber moment that he was a classic redistributionist. Central planning and the control economy were coming. I thought the American people still loved liberty enough to shout(but most can not engage in street theater like the left because of jobs and obligations, so only a few were heard at townhalls and tea parties) and GOP office holders, I hoped, would still have the backbone to fight. A few Republicans have resisted, notably South Carolina's Joe Wilson, but far too often when crunch time came, they were mute. They wanted to be collegial as our nation was sold down the river. A few, shamefully, even grabbed their share of the pork Obama was offering. Do you not know Obama would be coming for your guns already if the Fort Hood massacre had been perpetrated by a civilian? Obama could not plausibly claim though that soldiers like the attacker must also always be denied access to guns. Our Congress is for sale, our process is corrupted, and our Constitutional Republic is under siege from within. America is going down with a whimper.

Dark of Night

The US Senate, once known as the greatest deliberative body in the world, descended into one more corrupted organ of Obamaism last night, voting party-line to force Obama care on us. The vote occurred at one a.m., the perfect time for thieves in the night. This bill is purchased at the cost of liberty but with generous payoffs to two Senators who agreed to go along. Louisiana's Mary Landrieu sold her vote early on in the process and now, Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson has been bought and paid for with the Obama administration forcing the rest of the country to bear Nebraska's newly engendered costs. Sounds fair- doesn't it? A few billion in "incentives" to a couple of enterprising Senators to sell out our freedoms and our future.

Hell's Cold Day

The eleven month nightmare in Washington has been capped off with the greatest snowstorm in more than seventy years. Do you think it is any coincidence that this occurs as the global warming summit wraps up in Copenhagen, Democrats finalize the care rationing scheme to destroy the best medical system the world has ever known, and D. C. Mayor Adrian Fenty signs a bill to allow homosexual marriage there into law?

Behind Closed Doors

Behind closed doors, Democrats have plotted to take control of one-sixth of the American economy (in addition to car companies and bank already "assisted"). Behind closed doors, Democrats conspired to limit benefits of senior citizens, raise taxes, and increase government intrusion into private lives. Behind closed doors , Democrats schemed to force taxpayers of conscience to subsidize abortions. Behind closed doors, Democrats concocted an accounting trick where revenue is increased several years before expenses begin to hide the true cost of the program. (Seniors will bear the brunt of costs if they happen and doctors will be expected to forgo twenty plus percent of their reimbursement- and already over-burdened physicians will simply smile and accept the greater patient load engendered by thirty million newly covered patients and drastically reduced incomes.) Behind closed doors, Democrats manipulated an election in Minnesota whereby party apparatchiks replaced the moderate Republican Norm Coleman who seemed the leading vote-getter and who would have opposed Obama care with the unrepentant radical Al Franken who is in essence the deciding vote. Behind closed doors, Democrats made a mockery of open government and transparency promises with backroom deals and a bill Democrats seek to pass without public scrutiny and without many even reading the full text with three hundred plus pages of amendments just added to an already behemoth two thousand plus pages to know what they are voting for in their "careful deliberative process". Behind closed doors, Democrats have ignored your will, your rallies, your calls, your emails, and your letters indicating most voters do not want Obama care. Behind closed doors, Democrats are ruling without consent of the governed.

Stealing the Future

Western nations, first worlders, developed countries at the Climate Summit in Copenhagen agreed to give away the opportunity that their children and future generations should have had by right to enhance the power of the international elite. The Third World despots will have their lavish lifestyles further subsidized by the West with a plan to channel one hundred billion dollars to them to help them address environmental issues. Of course, like virtually everything else sent to these petty kleptocracies, the money will largely slip into the pockets of the powers that be and any environmental help will be incidental. And those in the industrialized world will deliberately inhibit their competitiveness. They will further sap their own prosperity and restrict economic freedom- perhaps even freedom of movement with new surveillance on driving habits and new fees and taxes on driving and flying. And all of this based on an environmental hoax, a scam actually that will enrich the few at the expense of the many. Man simply lacks the ability to raise or lower global temperatures two degrees, only God can do that. One Mount Etna-type eruption can spoil all our pitiful plans, but we are sacrificing real freedoms on promises we can not keep.

What Good Feeling?

Barack Hussein Obama's ascendancy was supposed to be accompanied by an era of good feelings in international relations with the world warming to the new US President as the anti-George Bush, but in the event the opposite has happened. In what was supposed to be a slam dunk climate summit with Obama arriving to receive more garlands and be crowned "Green Leader" of the world after his Nobel triumph, there has been nothing but finger-pointing and acrimony. So, our new tone leader who was going to lead the world in a giant kumbaya is slapped down once again as he has been on every significant issue since he entered office, from bilateral relations with Russia, to Iran and North Korea, even down to Hugo Chavez who handed Obama a book but continues his delusion that even Obama's US is about to invade. From economic to environmental concerns, to matters of security, the world with the exception of squeezed and beleaguered little Israel, has basically shrugged of the new US leader.

More Poison Entertainment

The most expensive movie ever made is being released. The movie is a transparent, reflexive, deconstructionist, revision of the "conquest" of the American West, set in a future time on some distant planet. James Cameron uses dazzling computer-generated images to make the same point as Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, that white America was just no darned good- expansionist, exclusionary, brutal, almost Hitlerian in scope and reach of evil. So while old SS veterans in Germany celebrate at annual reunions, young Americans are taught to hate their own country, the greatest sanctuary for the oppressed the world has ever known and the liberator of nations and people. So the American Indian in the world view of these filmmakers was living an idyllic, peaceful life until those mean white Europeans popped up, notwithstanding a documented historical record of warfare between tribes, including human sacrifice and even cannibalism. So you who follow the Hollywood left, worship your avatars, while those with any sense will be glad the Great Commission existed to bring civilization, progress, and prosperity to the Americas.

Said and Meant

Barack Hussein Obama campaigned on "hope and change" and while he has failed miserably on the hope part, Obama is living up to the transformational message- but not for any gain for our nation. Anyone who thought domestically that Obama could be thwarted did not take into account that he rose to the top through the cesspool of Chicago politics, proving himself able to glide easily amongst Illinois political gangsters. Obama did not reach the US Senate by being a nice guy, and he has surrounded himself with means to an end hardballers like Rahm Emanuel and Hillary Clinton. I was well aware that the "hell care" battle was not over with Republicans prematurely proclaiming victory. I said some socialistic measure to advance government and impede freedom will pass, and sadly, I will be right. The GOP is incredibly feckless and lacks the will to throttle our Marxist monarch in the making.

Pearl of Wisdom

A friend of my mother is an educated woman of a certain age. She found a coupon offer for an inspection and tune-up of her heating unit in a mass mailing. The price was under fifty dollars so my Mom's contemporary thought she had little to lose and could have her system performing optimally through the coming winter. Well, the offer was a come-on to encourage people to buy new energy efficient systems and take advantage of the government-offered Federal Income Tax credit on a new system. The first question the salesman pretending to be a maintenance man asked her should have been the red-flag. "So- you know much about HVAC systems?" Any time a mechanic or service person asks this type of question, you should run (or send him away), particularly if you are of the distaff sex. But this poor lady is a trusting soul, so on a seven year old system that was functioning flawlessly, with a cheap offer of a tune-up, she ends up buying an Obama compliant unit which will cost five grand but on which she is told she will receive a fifteen hundred dollar tax credit. The company that trapped her even had the gall to charge for a service call as she needed more than inspection and tune-up. So with this one good lie deserves another Obama administration warping the market with stimulus that as we see here rewards graft, in this con-artist world, my Mom's old classmate just found herself taken for at least thirty-five hundred dollars. Another victory for Obama-bots over morality and reason and another example of how government mucks things up- this lady had a perfectly functional central heater that should have had years more life but rushed to take advantage of a tax break, which means that when she would have actually needed a new unit in due course, her purchase will not be made as her buying decision has already been manipulated by government, with the net result being that ultimately the stimulus stimulated nothing, it simply unnaturally prompted advancing the date of a purchase that would have been made anyway and rewarded two grifters- the one from the HVAC company and the one in the White House.

Can Our Currency

The Congress of the United States, led by the sneering Harry Reid in the Senate and old stone-face Nancy Pelosi in the House, has just approved a trillion dollar appropriation to keep the Federal government running until September. This amount is in addition to a plan to raise the US debt ceiling that will allow 1.8 trillion dollars to be borrowed from foreign competitors including "implacable friends" like the oil sheiks and Red China. Further leveraging the dollar will give the Pretender in Chief even more money to play with- the boy President who rewards himself with a B+ will have that much greater opportunity to reward the shiftless at the expense of the productive. The inevitable consequence of spending by government as if it is using Monopoly money will be inflation, perhaps even hyperinflation. No nation can thrive by spending beyond her means with fiscal mismanagement and devalued currency.

Utterly Irresponsible Madness

A golfer, formerly of the greatest repute was conducting his personal life as if he lived in a house of ill-repute with a bevy of what one hopes at least were bathing beauties at the expense of his two children and his wife, who may have been blissfully unaware Tiger had been at least figuratively soiling the sanctity of the marriage bed even if the cavalcade of sluts had not literally visited the bed. The wool may have been pulled over the wife's eyes just as the American people were fooled and sold a bill of goods during the campaign where they were seduced- one must wonder who was bedazzled the most, the wife or the voters? I would contend a nation about to throw away the best health care system in the world and about to relinquish economic self-determination to developing foreign competitors really got the shaft. Either way, one very unhappy woman victimized by a husband experiencing "the most a man can get" or three hundred million misled Americans, one must concede a lot of folks are getting the short end of the stick.

Not a Goalkeeper

Though they may never enjoy the fame of a Pele or a Zinedine Zidane, no club ever leaves the football (soccer) pitch victorious without a skilled net minder blocking more of the opposition's attempts on goal than goals they are able to produce themselves. People often make analogies between politics and sport. Barack Hussein Obama made certain promises as he campaigned. Among them were keeping unemployment under eight percent. While the official figure is hovering around ten percent, economist say the actual rate may be near seventeen percent when discouraged job seekers and the underemployed are taken into account. If this figure prevails, we have more than double the jobless that Obama envisioned. Obama said he would close the Guantanamo Bay facility for terrorist detention as he sought the highest office. Thankfully, to this point, Obama has not fulfilled that one either though a letter has been leaked that the remorseless detained jihadists will be his gift to his adopted home state of Illinois. Nothing says gratitude like sending a few hundred head choppers to menace his former neighbors. Obama has not met any expectations for the good, but he has realized some of our worst fears to his true leftist leanings. Obama has failed already in the primary mission, allowing the Fort Hood Massacre and then equivocating about its cause. He already allowed one opponent's ball into our goal, and it is sadly certain more enemies are determined to take their shots on goal, promising greater destruction as well.

New Rogues' Gallery

Over the course of time, some real baddies have flourished, from Caligula and Nero, to Hitler and Stalin, to your work-a-day Jack the Ripper or Charlie Manson. Some of the human horrors are most notable for stealing little but damaging greatly like Bonnie and Clyde or Dillinger while other like Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff stole big. Today, a new list must include Kim Jong-il who I would not trust as a sushi chef, but who is still running a country that menaces South Korea and Japan and is bent on acquiring missiles that can threaten the United States. The North Korean leader should be put on the mentally unable to perform list- permanently. Mad Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his mullah backers are on the kill them all, let Allah sort them out march, trying to turn the Iranian people, the inheritors of the glory of Persia, into an End Time cult. Wahhab crazies like bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban have similar aims, to force the infidel to submit or wipe the unbeliever from the earth. Bernie Madoff has certainly earned his dishonorable mention, but what he took is chump change compared to the racketeers running D.C. who have just raised the debt limit another 1.8 trillion dollars. The chief rogues are the ones (like Soros) behind the installation of an unvetted and previously untested pretender into the highest office. Those who created Obama and prop him up are stealing the United States.

All Too Cozy

Republican US Senators Tom Coburn and vanquished Presidential candidate John McCain came out Tuesday in high dudgeon to denounce some of the wasteful stimulus spending, but in so doing, they missed the forest for the trees and showed how incredibly weak the poor old GOP is and how the old line media has ossified. What should be a scandal of Teapot Dome proportions is barely remarked upon as a few Republican semi-stalwarts mention that two firms Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's campaign pollster runs, received nearly six million stimulus dollars (snatched from honest taxpayers) to preserve three (3), count them- three jobs. McCain and Coburn said that this outrage was an "inefficient" use of Federal funds. Hundreds of jobs could (should) have been created, not three jobs saved for that amount, so in so far as the statement went, the Senators were right. It is a poor and inefficient way to squander taxpayer dollars, but it also  should be emphasized by  Republicans with real backbone that this must be seen as an emolument that reeks of Chicago-style cronyism. That so few Republicans even trotted out for a whimper when they should roar, that public accountability groups that crucify Republicans  for much less are silent, and that the dinosaur media yawns is itself as great a scandal. Republicans and journalists should be shouting "corruption" but are too dazzled by Obama's prestidigitation to notice (or a cynic might argue, some of the Republicans are quiet because they could be caught in the same net). In what could be a penitentiary matter over payoffs or a hidden quid pro quo to retire Obama's Secretary of State Clinton's campaign debt to Penn or even through improper diversion of funds, rise to the level of an impeachable offense,  bringing a cacophony of protest, the silence is deafening.

Nobel for Nothing

Barack Hussein Obama jaunts off today to accept the accolades of the world's leftist elite by collecting his prize for elocution, not grandiloquence as he is merely reading from a text someone else prepared as he burns out his teleprompters. The content of these speeches mattered little to Obama or to the people presenting him with the award. Obama is garnering the honor in the way Seinfeld had a premise- it was a show about nothing, but plenty of people with empty lives tuned in anyway. This Nobel reflects perfectly on both the Nobel Committee that has formerly awarded the same prize to the founder of modern terrorism, the late but only lamented by fools, Yasser Arafat and the man who was formerly America's worst President, Jimmy Carter. Obama fits perfectly on this list, receiving an unearned so-called honor from a bunch a self-satisfied elite twits.

Chicken Little Bull

What is emerging in the climate hoax summit in Copenhagen is utterly predictable but dangerous dribble with First World nations employing environmental regulation as a mechanism of control over their citizens, Third World nations demanding compensation for the environmental damage the First World nations have supposedly wrought on them and for the development that they claim they will now have to eschew to protect the atmosphere (which development I must say never happened in these backwards places before the global warming hysteria anyway). The elites at this summit comprise a bunch of self-serving scientists whose grants have been contingent on them advancing the notion that man is destroying the earth, power-hungry politicians and their bureaucratic minions who seek one more way to grab from your wallets and intrude into your lives, Leo DiCaprio and Ted Danson-type celebrities who will ignore the very regulation that they are advocating and continue to live large in their own lives with their beaches and ski slopes less crowded with the riffraff like me who will no longer either be permitted to travel or will not be able to buy the thousands of dollars in carbon offsets that will eventually have to be purchased to buy an airplane ticket. Little things like private aviation and plasma TVs will be out of reach of ordinary people under the coming "green tyranny". And all this to protect the privilege of the Western elites and Third World kleptocrats (borrowed with grateful acknowledgement from George Will) who corrupt the United Nations and stymie decency around the world. Save the earth- preserve human progress- reject Copenhagen.

Aware and Alarmed

The Environmental Protection Agency "Pearl Harbored" the citizenry of the US today with a finding that that agency has the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions with the release no doubt timed to coincide with the Climate Summit in Copenhagen. These uncivil masters have forgotten that they are our civil servants. We do not work for them; they work for us. The President and his enviro-minions want the power to intrude further into our lives and further strip our freedoms. The EPA does not run us, even with the neophyte Marxist as President, we still run the nation and it is long past time that we assert our rights. Enough of Obama and his intolerable acts.

Awake and Alert

Today marks the sixty-eighth anniversary of the day the cat jumped, that date that "will live in infamy" as FDR so rightly declared. So where are we (the United States) today when it comes to being caught with our guard down? We are nearly as unprepared as we were on December 7, 1941 or September 11, 2001- our two great national security disasters, both of which, had intelligence been read correctly, could have been averted. Our Secretary of Defense Robert Gates just declared this very weekend that "we have no good intelligence on the location of Osama bin Laden", in fact, despite rewards available in the many millions and great national resources devoted to finding him, that we have not had actionable intelligence on the arch terrorist in years. And this is not the largest part of the security deficiency as it exists today. Our failure to screen jet cargo, lack of screeners at ports, lax security around chemical and nuclear sites are not the worst of the lapses either. The glaring dangers are complacency, that permits all the aforementioned problems to continue, along with re-imposition by the Obama administration of the pre-9/11 mindset, complete with regarding the war as a criminal issue and re-inititating some of the barriers to intelligence sharing that were started by the Clinton administration to further criminal prosecutions of those who should be regarded as enemy combatants and not afforded Constitutional protections and due process rights. This, coupled with political correctness, that absolves clear motive of jihad from events such as the Fort Hood massacre and the recent murder of Professor Richard Antoun at Binghamton University, shows we are no longer serious about naming the enemy as expansionist political Islam as manifested in worldwide jihad including attacks directed against the homeland. The last President Bush never fully embraced the concept of "the religion of peace" as the enemy, but Obama has kowtowed altogether, singling our ally Israel out for opprobrium and in so doing, feeding the flames of jihad and contrary to what Obama intends, making peace less, not more likely, causing both Arabs and Israelis to dig in their heels. The United States after Pearl Harbor should have been ever vigilant, but we are once again blinded by the veils of political correctness and complacency.

Slam Dunk Socialism

Since the rise of FDR, conservatives have railed against slowly encroaching socialism, a steady creep toward the left, only really delayed briefly by the Reagan Revolution before "read my lips" no real backbone George the First rolled around to protest meekly as he made common cause with tax raisers and freedom robbers. There is nothing slow anymore with the leftward slide as the crawl becomes an avalanche. Obama will jaunt off to pick up his "Nobel for Nothing" and bring back binding greenhouses gas reductions for free- leaving US in dire straits. Obama will win on "hell care"- we lose. Every aspect of Obamaism raises our costs and impinges our freedom. Obama's former sport was basketball. Now the President plays mostly more sedate golf, but he won a state championship on the hardwoods of Hawaii. Now, Obama is in his glory again, wrecking what serves us and advanced human freedom for more than two centuries. Obama delivers "slam dunk socialism".

Obama's Green Phase

Green has always had a number of associations. An inexperienced newbie has often been called "green"- still wet behind the ears. By his actions, being rolled by foreign adversaries and seemingly at sea for months on Afghanistan, Obama is proving to be a babe in the woods and easy pickings for realpolitik tough guys like Vladimir Putin and China's Hu Jintao. Obama even managed to harm relations with India by focusing on himself and praising his own graciousness for hosting the Indian premier in his first official state dinner. Obama appeared to be asking the leader of our great ally India, the world's second most populous nation, if he knew how lucky he was for the chance to be received by the Obamas. Obama remains committed to the "green" agenda on the environment and will further cripple job creation by signing on to carbon reductions that are bound to destroy industry on his coming trip to Copenhagen despite the documented evidence of scientific fraud by climate researchers pushing man-caused global warming. Obama's environmental overreach is bound to grab more green from American wallets as businesses by necessity will pass their newly engendered green costs on to the consumer who will also have to foot higher utility bills. And as far as green goes in terms of lucre, the last President Bush was accused of enriching cronies playing by "rules according to oil" and aiding Cheney's Halliburton cabal. Surely, Obama's friends continue the practice of spreading this "green" around with Obama just as ethically challenged as the worst of his predecessors. Obama loves to play the green with envy game- he is the foremost shill for class envy we have ever had in the highest office. Finally, Obama himself has a literal green hue, not a pleasant Kermit-like bright green either but a kind of Qaddafi mauve shade. Maybe, Obama needs to get out into the sun more which he will have plenty of time to enjoy in surf Hawaii after we send him home as a one-term President.

"No Job" Summit

Barack Hussein Obama brought out the breathing props yesterday including "bobble-head" Biden to stage the appearance of concern over the depression level job losses the nation continues to sustain under Obama's mismanagement. The dinosaur media, of course, continues to spin feverishly for Obama as they try to present the "tailored" (read manipulated) figure of 11,000 new jobs lost in November as good news. The President's pronouncements after the theater of the summit continue to demonstrate that he blames the private sector for the situation and will show no faith in traditional free market capitalistic fixes that have worked every time they have ever been tried. Obama, at the least, remains an overt socialist as every program he embraces grows the government at a cost to the private sector. Obama's minions including those in the media will present our national disaster as rosy recovery as we continue to slide into public option "hell care" and "cap and tax" oblivion. Obama has the perfect recipe not for recovery but for one part European, one part Zimbabwean collapse.

Define a Settler

I am, as it happens, Jewish but have scrupulously avoided parochial commentary in this forum, but as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acquiesces to Obama's desires and betrays his own base by agreeing to a ten-month "settlement freeze", I feel I have no choice but to comment. Either Israel has a Biblical claim, a right to exist on the land as was ordained by God Himself or the Jewish state is a wholly illegitimate enterprise. I believe and am firmly convicted that the Lord commended the Holy Land to the Jewish people who after generations of exile for a large diaspora (but with a continued presence through most of that sad era as a minority in some places on the Land) have fulfilled their called destiny and returned to what was Promised. After the Zionists emerged and the state was born, access to holy sights of all faiths was maintained only by the Jews as the Arab-administered areas systematically excluded Jewish religious practice, limited Christian access, and indeed, even desecrated ancient Jewish graves and holy sites routinely. Jews have not crafted some exclusionary Zionist entity but welcomed the world to worship and even after liberating East Jerusalem in 1967, continued to allow Muslims to administer the Dome of the Rock. Israel has been successfully demonized as a Nazi-like tyranny with poor repressed Arabs as victims of the Jews, but the Jews have been the targets of Arab animus leading to murder long before the Jewish state came into being in 1948. Jews were the dispossessed people reclaiming what was rightfully theirs, and it is my belief that Jews have an absolute right to live anywhere on the Land. There are no "settlers". Settlers are Jewish citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. They can not and should not be distinguished from their brothers and sisters in Tel Aviv. If it is right for a Jew to live in Netanya or Herzliya, it is equally right for a Jew to reside in Hevron. What Obama has demanded and Netanyahu now has kowtowed to is inherently racist, wrong, and a slap at the God of the Bible. Ten million people calling a dog a horse does not make it so. A minority of the righteous will ultimately prevail over a vast assembly of the wicked. Either no Jew should be anywhere on the Land or all are there as answer to a Divine Promise. World pressure, Muslim hatred, Arab oil money, Obama's wrongheadedness, and even Netanyahu's craven capitulation can never thwart or reverse the Will of God.

Mighty Narrow Shoulders

Last night, President Barack Hussein Obama addressed the cadets of West Point, the troops, our allies, the nation, our enemies and the world concerning his plans to relinquish Afghanistan to her own devices starting in 2011 when we begin retreat to ignominy. Barack Hussein Obama's speech did not inspire; he did not encourage our forces in the field who based on his grim tone and failure to provide all that was requested might be expected to be disheartened and demoralized. Obama began the speech with a clever bit of buck passing by way of self-serving fractured history, holding the previous Bush administration to account while absolving his own team entirely for whatever outcome Afghanistan ultimately yields.  Obama has inadvertently aided the cause of the Taliban and al Qaeda and no doubt, boosted their recruiting as they now know that if they can merely hold out until 2011, our forces will start to leave no matter what. Obama mentioned "mutual respect" with the Afghans, which defies logic as Afghans were the willing hosts of al Qaeda and are amongst the most misogynistic and atavistic haters in the world who must be acknowledged only as fearsome warriors  (based largely on a near total disregard of the value of life including their own) and prodigious opium producers and nothing else. The jihadists may decide to lie low until then and bide their time until they know we are headed out the door or they may increase the pace of their attacks throwing martyrs into the grinder as they are not casualty adverse but wish to fall as shaheeds and harass us on the way out causing more US deaths in what if we are leaving anyway can only be called a lost cause. The President's speech was not inspiring but shows weakness and should provoke fear that we have lost our national prestige and our losing our nation. But Obama still enjoys the power of the office with the clout of the Presidency and allies running both chambers of Congress and many fellow travelers presiding over our courts. This skinny weakling can do untold harm domestically and abroad- at the moment, Obama has the will and the power to irrevocably alter the nation as we have known her, the America we have loved.

Flea on Pachyderm

 A little nuisance of a faux journalist attempted to smear former Alaska Governor and former Republican Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin with a non-story that she has flown on an expensive private jet for parts of her book tour. This attempt to spur a populist backlash against a real down-to-earth leader with more balls than most anyone in Washington D.C. is laughable. The report even mentions Palin sold Alaska's state jet to further the smear. There is a huge difference between taxpayer funded extravagance and what an individual with their own wealth or with a publishing company's backing is able to enjoy. No tax-confiscated funds were used on the Going Rogue book junket, no citizen was involuntarily forced to foot the bill for the Palin flights. To David Wright trying to sink Sarah Palin's future political prospects- you are less than a gnat on an elephant. 

Day of Decision

December 1, 2009 is the day President Barack Hussein Obama announces his plans for our forces in Afghanistan, using the venue of the US Military Academy at West Point as a prop for political brownie points. June 6, 1944 was another date of consequence to the future of the world with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt listening to General Dwight David Eisenhower and providing every available resource to make the crusade started on that D-Day successful. It is a shame that we now have a leader who rightly termed Afghanistan a war of necessity (which in my mind means a war that must be won) who will not even give General Stanley McChrystal, the full number of additional forces that were requested months ago that McChrystal, the Eisenhower of today leading troops there, said were the minimum not needed to prevail but simply to stave off defeat. Both the US entry into the Second World War and the current Afghan campaign were triggered by a "day of infamy" (to borrow from FDR) with December 7, 1941 setting off the first and September 11, 2001 triggering the latter, but back when America's leaders still had backbone, we knew any war our nation embarked on, we had an obligation to win. This Obama with benchmarks and timetables for troop withdrawal makes a mockery of the loss of 3000 in two towers in Manhattan, in a field in Pennsylvania, at the Pentagon itself, and the thousand who have died since in the effort to avenge the outrage in the lair where Osama himself planned, Afghanistan. Pray the pretender in office is replaced by a leader who will not settle for defeat but will pay any price for victory before the US losses not only all credibility as as world power but even as a reliable nation.  

Forever and Ever

No nation, group, or sane individual would ever want to suffer constant warfare, but thanks to the weakness of Jimmy Carter who allowed the specter of Khomeinism to be released, that fate is what the US has been consigned to endure. The genie of jihad had been more or less dormant on the international scene with some manifestations of secular pan-Arabism as was manifested in Nasser, some Marxist leaning extremism in Yemen, and the theatrical but dangerous rise of Qaddafi in Libya, but until Carter promoted the downfall of the Shah, tolerated the return of Ayatollah Khomeini from Paris to Tehran, and countenanced the seizure of the US embassy there and the detention of fifty-two US hostages for 444 days, the threat of Islamic extremism could have been contained. Now and for the foreseeable future, the West will face violent, expansionist political Islam because the US showed herself to be a toothless tigress when a better leader would have demonstrated just how hard we could bite. Now we have eternal terror threat, modified lifestyles, and relinquished freedoms because Carter had no metal. Just think what one committed felon did, murdering four armed police in Washington state and amplify that thousands of times over with American Muslims returning from the Hajj who may take a side trip to Pakistan to learn and train hard in the ways of war. But a wiser man than I long ago said "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom".

Double Down Barack

Barack Hussein Obama will speak to the world on Tuesday to announce his intentions for the US in Afghanistan. Obama is determined to prevail on several fronts, unfortunately the Afghan front is not amongst them. Obama is still determined to sign the US onto firm emissions reduction targets when he visits Copenhagen to battle the chimera of man-caused global warming despite the emerging scientific fraud scandal involving the founding tenets of the false church of anthropogenic power to influence the environment all that drastically. In fact, the President should be doing the opposite and doing everything possible to find and harness cheap energy to restart the engine of our prosperity. President Obama is equally determined to push health care forward, and pass whatever higher taxes are necessary to start to fund it. This is of course at a time when Obama pretends an interest in job creation, going so far as to have an upcoming job summit. The best way to create jobs in the private sector of course would be to lower the marginal tax rates, giving the entrepreneurs who do the hiring more capital to expand and move the nation forward again. But Obama does not have the slightest interest in doing this. His are the natural inclinations of the Marxist. On the shooting war front, Obama has already announced a timetable for capitulation (withdrawal from) Iraq and his troop commitment of 34,000 to be sent to Afghanistan to be announced Tuesday is doing war on the cheap, under the number of forces requested by commanders in the field, and selling us short as a nation by not even attempting to win- only trying to "wind down" what Obama himself had termed our "war of necessity". I agree the war was and is necessary and in any endeavor with such high table stakes, victory must absolutely be the goal, even if it means spending trillions and reimposing selective service (the military draft). The alternative of craven retreat with the Taliban coming back into power is simply unthinkable. Imagine a victory parade through the streets of Kabul with Mullah Omar hand in hand with Osama bin Laden himself. This the American people could never countenance. So on matters that harm our prospect for recovery, cripple prosperity, and sap initiative, President Obama is all in- from strictures on carbon emissions based on a false premise and fraud with proof to the contrary becoming readily apparent to those willing to look, to freedom-robbing "hell care" schemes to ration our medical access and tell us how we must live, Obama is dead serious, but on a war we could, should, and must win, Obama is temporizing.

Scuttle the Ship

Is it possible that a supposedly wealthy Arab enclave might default on a substantial amount of dollars in loans as a means of waging economic warfare against the West? Just as some contended that OPEC nations (including Venezuela) raised the barrel price of oil so substantially at the end of the the last term of the last President Bush that their actions became the straw that broke the camel's back and made recession inevitable with four dollar plus per gallon gasoline and that this served as a concerted assault against our economies, Dubai was biding her time to default just when it would hurt the West the most and crush any chance of creating or sustaining real economic recovery. Is it possible that our adversaries just manipulate the market, use their cartel status as a weapon, and even time the release of bad news to wage war by other means against the capitalist and the infidel?

Fudge the Numbers

A cataclysm is brewing, but the dinosaur media is playing ostrich and doing everything it can to ignore what by rights should be a monumental story- in fact the story of moment- focusing on the climategate scandal, rather than a pair of celebrity wannabe gatecrashers. Science has always been predicated on questioning hypothesis and heretofore the obligation of science was to attempt to disprove itself. This premise of skepticism has been abandoned when it comes to man-made climate change, generally advanced as man-caused global warming with the outriders who question man's role and his ability to have huge influence on the earth's atmosphere being termed "deniers" in the same sense as Holocaust deniers. But now the dam has burst with the leak of material related to manipulation of data at East Anglia University in Great Britain, either by a hacker (hackers) or a whistle blower within the program itself. Scientific fraud and gross manipulation seem to have taken place on an international scale to promote the global warming myth. It seems in the words of Damon Runyon that "the fix was in". Of course, governments have been known to massage data to accentuate the positive and bury the negative as we may now be seeing with the Obama administration feeding us a non-existent rosy recovery and artificially keeping unemployment numbers already grim but under what they actually are to make Obama's performance seem outstanding when in the estimation of many, we have not even emerged from recession or are facing a second dip into recession scenario. But what has been done in the realm of global warming turns scientific integrity on its head. We have long faced political correctness on the college campus but this climate orthodoxy has been subject to political correctness run amok and now seems to have been bolstered by statistical tricks, lies, and contrived fraud. A worldwide industry has been spawned and the world seems ready to sacrifice more productivity and prosperity at the coming climate summit in Copenhagen based not on man-made climate change but made-up fiction.

Obama Is Disarming

Barack Hussein Obama is a dynamic speaker from a prepared text. While I and others find him distant or even cold in the manner he relates to humanity, some might consider his charisma enough to disarm in the word's traditional sense. I and the world leaders Obama has encountered who have left him in the lurch do not consider him "disarming" in this way. But Obama seems hellbent to disarm in literal ways- from his time as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama has been against the private ownership of guns as seems to be a right clearly conferred by the Second Amendment of the US Constitution, and more important, part of the natural right- indeed, God-given obligation of self-defence. Obama has been an advocate of nuclear disarmament- the first US President so convicted of the notion to take substantive more or less unilateral actions to reduce our nuclear stockpiles. Now Obama, seeks to further gut force protection by signing the US onto the anti-personnel landmine ban treaty as was advanced in her lifetime by the somewhat vacuous Princess Diana. Obama is nothing more than a pie-in -the-sky fantasist, knee jerk liberal who believes guns=bad, nukes=bad, landmines=bad without any consideration of the great number of innocent deaths these tools have prevented. Projecting weakness only invites attacks.

Friends at Technorati

For linking purposes, this post is a departure from my usual cogent, pithy, and sometimes even witty offerings to my loyal readers. Claim code:ZWX7HSJNE6DV

Attitude and Gratitude

Barack Hussein Obama is virtually certain to issue the obligatory Thanksgiving proclamation that previous Presidents have found de rigueur at this time of year. Obama's predecessors have genuinely felt the gratitude and have not found it necessary to try to undo the country and start over, but our current President has promised to be transformative and is certainly delivering change. Obama is expanding Federal scope and reach beyond anything seen before, enhancing Washington's intrusiveness and power right down to looking over your family doctor's shoulder during your physical. Barack Obama has traveled the world over apologizing for the nation as America existed prior to his ascendancy and groveled to Saudi, Japanese, and as shown today on Drudge, China's leader. Obama is pathetic, but his objectives, if fulfilled, will ruin us. If public option health care passes, a bureaucracy as large as the entire Federal government itself as it exists today will have to be created to service it as the medical sector is over fifteen percent of the nation's economy. Ad to this the dependency class Obama seems to be deliberately growing and one sees the danger of rapidly losing the beacon of freedom and prosperity the United States heretofore was. Count your blessings this year and number among them that Obama's plan to transform America into a socialist country has not fully succeeded yet.

The Buck Passer

Has anyone else noticed that for a man in charge of such weighty issues Barack Obama seems to have mighty narrow shoulders? When America was attacked on September 11, 2001, George W. Bush accepted all blame for any security breech which advanced the attacks (too much responsibility for some who wanted to see those in the ranks of the nation's security services purged of those who dropped the ball and failed to connect the dots of a number of Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons simultaneously with no interest in learning to take-off or land their planes, right down to security screeners who saw men of similar backgrounds in Boston boarding planes with box cutters and mace and did nothing to thwart the plot). When any controversy is generated by the Obama administration, the President finds a handy target to deflect criticism elsewhere. Nearly a year into office, our economic problems remain the last President Bush's fault. Terrorists who bragged of planning the 9/11 outrage are brought to trial in New York City, talk to Attorney General Holder, as if the President did not know and could not influence or alter the decision to remove them from Gitmo. You are a Hollywood leftist type, a prominent Democratic contributor from Manhattan, or an American of East Indian heritage who has accomplished greatness but you failed to receive an invitation to the President's first official state dinner in the midst of many other unofficial bacchanals and feel slighted, do not blame President Obama, the First Lady, his wife Michelle Obama makes all the final decisions on the guest list, our duck and run President will not even stand-up and face the music on party guest lists. Does it not sadden to have such an evident weak sister on decisions great and small in office? Does it surprise anyone that Obama refused and refuses to seek victory in Afghanistan- now on an issue of national prestige, even maintaining credibility as a nation, Obama will announce not a plan to win but an "exit strategy". Weaklings who do not feel comfortable with the very "idea of victory" inevitably secure defeat in their own self-proclaimed wars of necessity.

Deny, Delay, Denounce

Iran has launched a five day war game aimed at protecting the nuclear program that that nation initially denied having, reluctantly admitted later only after said program became impossible to hide, still claimed various facilities for atomic production did not exist, and only recently complied with international inspection of one long-denied facility, only after Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency had provided the Iranians with sufficient time to hide weapons development evidence at the site near the holy city of Qom. Much of the world has ignored the threat a nuclear weapon in the hands of religious fanatics would pose believing that the primary and probably sole target of any Iranian WMD attack would be Israel, but countries in the region are increasingly worried with Iranian proxy Shias already launching a brush fire war from Yemen against the Sunni regime in neighboring Saudi Arabia. The Iranians have succeeded in delaying imposition of more serious sanctions, playing the international community for the suckers they are and are near if not passed the point of weapons production. Consternation has long been felt in Israel, which state the Iranian leader consistently disparages and which Ahmadinejad has ominously promised will be erased from the globe. The Iranian regime is ever closer to fulfilling that pledge.

End of Exceptionalism

The US Senate moved one step closer to terminating the greatest experiment in liberty the world has ever known with last night's health care vote. The unique nature of the cradle of liberty and her role in spreading freedom is lost on supporters of health care reform, who assail our foundational values, our risk for reward ethos, our very heritage and noble patrimony to re-make Amerika in the mold of a European nanny state. At best we will be a fiscally broken shadow of our former self as a nation should public option pass, at worst and I fear the worst as I have never known of any truly benevolent dictators, the US could descend into a totalitarian nightmare of care lines like Great Depression era breadlines and citizens having to beg bureaucrats to spare their or their relatives' lives. This is not the country we have known but eerily similar to what many of our progenitors fled from- do not believe it can not happen here.

The Last Straw

If the two thousand page freedom-stealing behemoth of health care reform passes, put paid to the country we have loved. I am less than sanguine that any Democrat will stand to thwart the legislation by joining a Republican filibuster. The jubilation may be short-lived as the triumph will engender so much bitterness among voters that if any fair election is held, Democrat office-holders will lose in droves. Do not give the left even a Pyrrhic victory though- it has too much of a cost, too much intrusiveness into the most personal aspects of our lives, and too much of a chance to ruin US.

Convention Center Madness

Controversy has once again fallen on Nashville, Tennessee's planned convention center, this time over the city government using eminent domain to obtain five acres of unimproved property (at the moment a parking lot but where the current owner Tower Properties intended to construct a hotel complex of their own using private funds) for more than fourteen million dollars. I am not concerned at the particular details of this beyond my innate preference for private rather than public projects- those that make economic sense without the need for taxpayer subsidy and whose expense is borne by developers who spend their own and their investors' money on an effort they believe makes economic sense and avoid raiding the public coffers. What concerns me greatly though is the construction of a new billion or so dollar convention center at a time when convention business is drying up nationwide. Las Vegas with every conceivable tourist facility and amenity available is suffering the largest drop in convention business that city has ever experienced. Hotel and casino construction there has largely been put on hold, with massive planned projects postponed or canceled. Our President, Barack Hussein Obama has himself warned of the possibility of a double dip recession which may be overly optimistic as we may be on the precipice of economic depression if we have not already entered said catastrophic downturn. Why continue a massive unnecessary expenditure of public funds (read money confiscated from taxpayers), when there appears to be no prospect whatsoever of robust convention business in the US in the foreseeable future? Why squander so much on a project of choice when so many other needs from funding the schools to repairing potholes already and always exist? Why spend so much now for a short-term boost in construction jobs, many of which will likely be filled with undocumented workers (read criminal aliens) when all you are creating is a continued expense for the community of Nashville to maintain with property owners ultimately burdened with higher property taxes when the tourism and convention business city leaders, the politicians who are pushing the project forward, never see the hotel tax revenue they are expecting to fund the project materialize and leave the general fund exposed with bond obligations to pay for, by necessity producing a rise in every tax and fee the city can muster to pay for the mistake of building now in the teeth of what is at least a recession? Why not use prudence and delay the new convention center until the economy improves?

More Government Efficiency

A computer glitch, initially reported to have happened in Atlanta, has thrown the air traffic control system on the East Coast into disarray. Only about 40% of flights are running near schedule with air traffic controllers having to maintain a twenty minute window between flights rather than the usual eight. Some analysts expect the system to still be recovering from the lag until Thanksgiving. Why would you want to give the government gang that can not shoot straight on something as simple as maintaining the air corridors control over your life and death decisions when it come to health care?

Rates A Four?

Sarah Palin was asked to give her opinion of Barack Obama's performance while on the national media leg of her junket for Going Rogue. She is generously rating the President on a scale of one to ten at four. At best, I would give him a two, only because he has not fulfilled his promises to his peacenik and radical base and is still fighting the terrorists in Iraq rather than the retreat to defeat he campaigned on, and he also enjoys small kudos because he has not haphazardly closed Gitmo and in fact, has extended his time frame to do so in a more open-ended way than his leftist base would like. So the only aspects of his service so far commendable are continuations of Bush policy he had pledged to change while he was running for the highest office. On the plus side, Obama has not managed to give Taiwan to the mainland Reds or inadvertently through his justly perceived weakness managed to start a shooting war on the Korean peninsula. All in all, with the economy continuing to tank, unemployment cresting at depression levels, casualties mounting in Afghanistan, the failure to engage in the war on Islamic radicalism or even call jihad for what it is, I think a rating of two out of ten is plenty.

An American Thatcher

Could Sarah Palin be America's Iron Lady? Sarah Palin is gaining vast national exposure while promoting her autobiography Going Rogue which is being released nationwide. Palin will tour to promote the book, visiting smaller towns not often graced by a national figure turned author. She is folksy, as was a Will Rogers, projecting a down-to-earth image of caring and common sense. A caller to yesterday's Rush Limbaugh show said she had a Reagan-type optimism, which surely she does, but which Obama himself projects with his pretense of "hope". The difference is Palin like Reagan is firmly committed to the principles of the free market which will move the nation forward, while Obama, for all his rhetoric, is shrouding the US in the vale of socialism which will strangle recovery and prevent real sustained prosperity from ever returning. Palin also has the substantive experience of governing the largest state and dealing with complex issues from environment to energy to the shared border with Russia. Mock her all you want liberals- Sarah Palin certainly could not be doing any worse than your President.

Support the Troops

Barack Hussein Obama proclaimed his desire to "end" the war in Afghanistan before his term of Presidency expires, so as not to leave a problem in the hands of his successor. On the same day a poll said only 44% of Americans think the effort there is worthwhile while 52% now oppose the Afghan war. The President himself is largely responsible for the flagging support for the war at home. Obama has lacked leadership, shown indecision, refused to voice a vision for victory, even said he was "uncomfortable with the idea of victory" there. How could American support for the Afghanistan enterprise not slip when a President who campaigned that it would be our war of necessity can not even decide strategy, tactics, or fulfill the military's request for more boots on the ground there? Obama is failing the Commander-in Chief's primary mission- he is letting the troops down, creating more and unnecessary US casualties, and denying the servicemen and women the tools they need on the ground in Afghanistan to prevail. Of course, the public opposition will grow to a war if it simply becomes a bloodbath of attrition with no end and more important no "win" in sight.

Seems Vaguely Familiar

Jimmy Carter deflected blame for his failure in the Iran hostage crisis in a story from Thailand that was linked on Drudge. The former President Carter said he held-off on an attack because he feared twenty thousand Iranians would have been killed. So out of his concern for the welfare of the hostage-takers, Carter unleashed hell. Jimmy Carter let the genie of Islamic fundamentalism out of the bottle. So Carter's inaction has ultimately led to thousands of US deaths in the many subsequent terror attacks that have been inflicted on Americans all over the world and ironically many more innocent Iranians have lost their lives- Baha'i, minority Sunnis, some of Iran's repressed Jews who were disappeared, members of the tiny Iranian Christian community, Iranians of Arab rather than the dominant Persian background, the recently murdered protesters of the election stolen by Ahmadinejad, Iran's beleaguered homosexuals who have been publicly hanged, half a million or more killed in the war with Saddam Hussein's Iraq which might not have happened if Carter had reversed the Islamic Revolution which the US had the military capacity, but not the will, to do. Now we have a similarly weak leader, unwilling to confront evil and growing menace. I wonder where this craven failure of the will leads and how many thousands or millions more innocent will pay with their lives for the current administration's indecision and cowardice.

A Credit Primer

In my last post, I lampooned the presence of self-congratulatory signs emblazoned with the names or readily identifiable symbols associated with certain self-serving politicians who advance their acclaim while squandering our future. If Democrat leaders such as Nashville's former mayor Bill Purcell expect plaudits when they build a park complex, then their successors should accept blame when they close parks and public golf courses as a current Mayor Karl Dean claims due to budgetary constraints, he is now forced to do. If you spend like a drunken sailor, and grab all the gusto for your effort, when the bill comes due as inevitably it must, stand up and pay the piper- accept the responsibility with broad shoulders as readily as you took credit you never deserved. Ex-Mayor Purcell did not invent parks, green ways, or bridges, and we were not relying on ferries, before Bill Purcell (a Democrat) enlightened us. Now his Democrat successor Dean can not simply shrug his shoulders and say we have a lousy economy or my predecessor over-extended us when he closes what was such a pressing necessity for the public good when Purcell was mayor. On a national scale, Obama can print all the devalued currency in the world to pay for his excesses, but what you end up with when the Treasury's presses overheat is Wiemar wheelbarrows and Zimbabwe millionaires. Let's see how the leftist try and claim credit for that.

More Monumental Blunders

I happened upon a public project today, one that predated Obama's massive New Deal, WPA-style make-work projects. It was a mammoth pedestrian bridge spanning both sides of Nashville's Cumberland River to connect two green ways. One may debate the public good served by such projects as the most efficient use of scarce resources, but what is beyond debate is the audacity of politicians who reach into your wallet to fund such expenditures and then demand brownie points from you for their self-aggrandizing arrogance. A large, impressive bronze placard appeared at the gateway to the span. On it, in bold relief was "This project was made possible by the inspiration and vision of Mayor Bill Purcell". This is audacity at its finest, the chutzpah to tax us to death and expect garlands and kisses. President Obama has spread similar projects across the country, no doubt expecting gratitude and lifelong voter loyalty as FDR attained with the CCC, TVA, and the rest of this nation's early embrace of socialism. The symbol of Obama's so-called recovery-inducing stimulus spending is popping up all over, virtually ubiquitous, but such projects ultimately prolong misery, with the taxes necessary to fund them squeezing private enterprise into submission. We are paying for the monumental hubris of our leaders and only those possessed of monumental stupidity or beholden to these politicians for their jobs would keep voting them in. Obama's few make-work jobs are forcing the private sector engine of prosperity out of existence. Command and control economies with their bureaus of central planning do not ease but cause misery.

A National Disgrace

If a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a few seconds of video can be priceless. Early in his administration, Obama bowed before the king of Saudi Arabia, which action, his spokesman, the hapless Robert Gibbs, subsequently denied. I am sure Gibbs will again concoct some hollow excuse as a denunciation of what we all clearly saw, the President of the US once again demeaning himself at the feet of the Emperor of Japan and his bride. Perhaps Obama lost his contact lens, both contact lenses, or the same contact twice. Perhaps his invisible pince-nez fell off- twice. Our Founding Fathers, particularly Adams and Franklin bridled at the idea that any man was better by status of birth and rejected the Divine Right of kings. Now, we have an insouciant dunce bowing before an Emperor who has re-instituted the Shinto belief that he is a living god which the Japanese were forced to relinquish for over a generation in the wake of their defeat in World War II. Think of what the living heroes of the Pacific campaign must feel to see their President at the feet of the leader of a nation that led the merciless war of aggression, attempting the phony Asian Co-prosperity that the US was forced to resist after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. I can only imagine what the few remaining American survivors of the Bataan Death March must feel to see our country subservient, subjugated, and apologizing for their sacrifice and the loss of their comrades from a US leader who will not even acknowledge the justice and innocent-life saving aspects of our A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This Obama must sicken our Greatest Generation that fought so we would not have to bow to foreign tyrants.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur5kHykbu5w

The Pacific Presidency

On his current Asia excursion, Barack Hussein Obama has proclaimed his is the first "Pacific Presidency", citing his youth spent in Indonesia. Notice, Obama did not emphasize his birth which has been alleged to have occurred in the fiftieth state, nor did he focus on his high school years that clearly were spent in Hawaii. Obama highlighted his life in the world's most populous Muslim nation as the source of his Pacific affinity. Does anyone else not find this curious? This may ad fuel to the fire on the right of those questioning Obama's very eligibility to serve. Why did the President not say his was the first Pacific Presidency simply because of his Hawaiian place of birth, what he did say only fans the doubts amongst what till now was considered a fringe "birther" crowd. Maybe Obama delights in yanking his most strident critics chains.

Obama's Pocket Judges

Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi was asked this week about the constitutionality of the public-option health care plan that passed narrowly in the House and is now in the hands of the Senate. The Speaker looked at the reporter with the temerity to ask what should be an obvious question with utter contempt, saying in her expression "the Constitution is whatever we say it is. We bend it to our will". Pelosi is right, the activist judges facilitate the rise of radicalism with their Constitution as living document philosophy. Conservatives believe in the natural rights of man which gave rise to natural law that became the basis of our founding documents. Starting with the bizarre Roe v Wade ruling with a majority opinion based on "penumbras and emanations" to a right to privacy nowhere delineated in the Constitution to McCain-Feingold restricting free speech, the life's blood of democracy, the left has its politicians and judges working hand in hand to gut our rights. From rejecting the plain language of the Second Amendment to destroying property rights with eminent domain and an expansive consideration of environmental regulation, the courts are the handmaidens of those who grow government the most. There is a natural inclination of any organization or bureaucracy to consolidate power, advance its own fiat, and do everything it can to perpetuate itself. It was no surprise to see the courts declare military tribunals for Gitmo detainees deemed illegal, the courts wanted that purview for themselves and now Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will receive a trip to the scene of the monstrous crime he has openly bragged of planning, the September 11 attacks, at our expense he will be tried in New York City. This trial will cause chaos, increase danger, and does nothing to advance our national security. This is just the way Pelosi, a radical Representative from radical San Francisco, and Obama whose own Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, notoriously uttered "You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste", want things to go. If tension is simmering everywhere with violence, that seems to have been preventable, boiling over at Fort Hood and unemployment nearing Great Depression levels, people will be too distracted to see their rights are diminishing, disappearing, being stolen by the internationalists, the elite, the cadre of leftist politicians, and their anti-Constitutional rights-robbing robed bandits, the very judges who we have entrusted to safeguard our God-given liberty.

None Too Discerning

I never (to my knowledge) met a terrorist. Barack Hussein Obama began his political career in a terrorist's home (Bill Ayers- one of the founders of the Weathermen who exploded bombs that left several people dead in the 1960s). I do not know any racketeers and certainly never had a Tony Rezko arrange a sweetheart deal to buy a primary home as Obama did in Chicago. I never thought the regime of the mullahs in Iran could be talked down from their A-bomb aspirations or that they would not use the three hapless US students who allegedly wandered across the poorly-demarcated border from Iraqi Kurdistan as pawns as this is the same fanatic brand of tyrant who violated every international norm to hold fifty-two members of our embassy staff in Tehran for 444 days, but Obama is convinced he can use his charisma to charm Iran back into the family of nations. Beyond poor initial instincts, Obama with his hasty comments on the Cambridge Gates affair, with his policies which are evidently not working, and with his radical agenda, is either in well-over his head or deliberately dismantling the underpinnings of the country as his past associations with scofflaws and America-hating terrorists would suggest. I do not fault some of Obama's voters for their lack of discernment because the old-line media assiduously avoided digging into Obama's unusual background and almost never revealed much of what was known to implicate Obama that was only circulating in the small universe of the right-wing press. Many who voted for Obama, as clean as a whistle as he was portrayed, now are clearer on his character, but it is way to late to change their ballots to favor McCain.

Stench of Weakness

Iran rejects Western-offered compromise over their nuclear program, yet the world's lone superpower, the United States, says give Iran more time to reconsider, and sanctions which might have some suasion, are not ratcheted up but deferred to give Ahmadinejad and the mullahs more time to build a weapon and attach said weapon to a viable delivery system. This is appeasement of the worst kind and comes after we betrayed the Czech Republic and Poland by withdrawing the missile shield we had promised in what must be seen as an act of capitulation to angry Russia which gave us nothing in return for our servile gesture. So much of the former Eastern Bloc, the Warsaw Pact members which have embraced the West and sent their sons to die along side ours in Iraq and Afghanistan, have simply been sold out by the Obama administration which does not want to rock the boat with an ever-strengthening resurgent Russia which is reasserting military dominance as we cut our defense budgets and which is like the bad old days, interfering in Latin America- this time making common cause with Latin America's new Castro, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Even yesterday's North Korean incursion into South Korean territorial waters must be viewed in the light of the meeting US diplomats are about to have with North Korea, as we come crawling to resume talks over that last Stalinist state's atomic threat. The US could obliterate the pygmy pretend power in moments, but stands quaking at a tiny dictator who can not even pose as well as Mussolini. Even proposing talks with so-called "moderate Taliban" invites aggression as our enemies smell blood. They know their roadside bombs and suicide attacks are having an effect, or we would not be seeking talks. Obama's dovish outreach does the opposite of what the President intends. Domestically, the President's deliberate mischaracterization of the Fort Hood attack as anything other than jihad-inspired terrorism reeks with political correctness and is another symptom of a weakening resolve. Obama sells out friends and leaves Israel in Iran's crosshairs, as we learn yet again, the lesson of the schoolyard, weakness invites aggression. Obama has only emboldened the enemies of peace.

Boxes and Bags

Some volunteered, some were conscripted/ Some strode off, knowing they could beat the world/ Some were filled with trepidation from that fateful premonition/ Some were great patriots who embraced the founding ideal/ Some were fresh off the boat and had no idea what we were fighting for/ But they went anyway/ Think of what they could have done and seen/ Had they been allowed to play out the string/ Their future generations that never were/ The achievements becoming great accomplishments never made/ How they would have loved to live past Armistice Day/ In trenches, in forests, in fields, in oceans- lost to the sea/ In jungles and mountains and deserts of later struggles/ They fell in ones, and tens, and stacked like cord wood/ Did they pine for home as the were dying?/ Their love and loss that left us crying/ All those unrealized dreams/ Never tarnish their legacy and defend that spark of liberty that burned in their breasts and impelled them forward into the jaws of eternity.

Really Not Clever

Barack Hussein Obama has been called our most brilliant President by his acolytes. Obama has incredibly poor initial instincts for so supposedly smart a person. When Henry Louis Gates was arrested following a confrontation the professor fueled in Cambridge, Obama rushed to Gates' defense, essentially slandering American law enforcement with the broad-brush charge of racism. Obama was precipitous, uninformed, and ultimately wrong. In the Fort Hood atrocity, Obama listened to his advisors and hurried a Presidential statement, delivered on live TV by Obama himself. Obama followed advice and came out to speak but then spent two minutes on a shout-out on a completely unrelated matter while he monopolized network coverage, diminishing the impact of the meat of the statement he was making. He deliberately undercut the horror of the Fort Hood event, deflecting the terroristic intentions of the shooter, with some tangent about native Americans and Indian affairs involving a medal-recipient that had absolutely nothing to do with Fort Hood, but the cameras were there, were on, and Obama could betray his own misunderstandings, lack of comprehension of the attack, apprehension that real evil exists with fatal intentions toward the innocent, and Obama used the podium and chance he enjoyed to cloud the issue for the rest of us. A wiser statement would have been, "An act of terrorism has been perpetrated today against innocents on American soil. We will get to the bottom of the attack, capture the guilty, prosecute them to the full extent of the law, and do everything possible to assist the victims' families, the wounded, and the survivors, while doing all we can to never permit such an act in the future."

Stop the Presses

When the last President Bush was in office, the press was shouting "spider, spider", suggesting Bush was drawing us ever deeper into a web of lies. Bush was supposed to be a self-indulgent, bumpkin of a frat boy, who relied on the first President Bush and Dick Cheney to make his decisions for him, yet, George the Second was so practiced a liar that he could manipulate intelligence services around the world, the press, and the public, to initiate an unnecessary war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of mass destruction. My take is that George W. Bush was honorable and that the Iraqi government firing at US patrol aircraft in the no-fly zones was sufficient reason to resume hostilities, but some on the fringe of politics both right and left have even convinced themselves that Bush had a secret hand in the September 11 attacks to justify rewarding Halliburton cronies and in so doing, initiate worldwide carnage. The press has even granted airtime to the most bizarre conspiracy theorists who insist the fall of Tower Seven at the World Trade Center proves an inside job. Now, with Barack Hussein Obama in office, the dinosaur press gladly helps construct a web of lies, not daring expose even the most ludicrous Obama exaggerations (doctors enriching themselves by unnecessarily lopping off diabetic limbs for instance- which no physician could ever become wealthy by doing because reimbursement for said procedure is so low). The old-line press is actively complicit, doing all it can to advance the Obama agenda because they agree with Obama on his goals and where he is taking the nation. So, Obama's inauthentic moments are ignored, when he is insincere or contrived, the old-line media spins to his favor. If a Republican were doing or saying the same things, the main stream media would hammer him for it.